10 C O N T E X T 1 0 5 : J U LY 2 0 0 8 warm manner and his good humour. Clifford Price is emeritus professor of archaeological conservation, University College London, and former head of the ancient monuments laboratory, English Heritage. Man of stone I first met John Ashurst in 1974 when, as a student architect, I was awarded a bursary to study masonry conservation at a Men of the Stones seminar in Northamptonshire. John lectured eloquently for most of Saturday while the audience’s notebooks filled with page after page of jottings on the geology, mineralogy, quarry working, stoneyard processing, laying, decay and repair of stone. Over the tea break, I plucked up the courage to ask the great man how I could get a job like his, working with ancient monuments. His answer was friendly but not encouraging. But he proved an enduring inspiration for years to come. Later, when working in the Historic Buildings Division of the Greater London Council and confronted by technical issues upon which the textbooks seemed to have no reasonable answer, Iain McCaig and I would bitch over a pint (or three) that we could never get hold of the bastard. ‘We’ll have to learn this stuff for ourselves,’ we agreed, and set to it with determination. Taking short courses at the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies at York, or attending the Building Conservation diploma classes at the Architectural Association, we students of Ashurst quickly learnt the patter and most of the content from his oftrepeated talks and much loved visits – so much so that he once bribed me with a bottle of wine not to ask him questions at the end of his presentation about the cow contraceptive treatment for masonry (it’s a long story). Soon afterwards, Iain found himself working in John’s Research and Technical Advisory Service team and discovered why the telephone always rang and rang in Savile Row, and was only ever answered by the tea lady. ‘John who, darling? Nah, never heard of ’im dear.’ He was never there. He was out gently guiding architects and craftsmen on building sites – where his heart really lay. Then when I joined English Heritage and became John’s boss (16 years his junior), we found his telephone face-down in a drawer smothered with six volumes of Yellow Pages. Pushing paper and dealing with the endless calls for free advice were never John’s thing. We owe it to Bob Chitham, then directing architect of English Heritage, to co-authors and editors, Nicola Ashurst and Frank Dimes, and draughtsman McCaig that John published much at all. They chased, cajoled and ultimately bribed him, or did the writing or drawing themselves to get the genius out of the man and on to paper. This is not to say that his written and drawn communication skills are not convincing in their own right. Ashurst’s exemplary working diagrams have an illustrative force that cannot be underestimated, and would need a very large number of words and pictures (before, during and after the intervention described) to otherwise explain what is intended. Of course, with every generation there comes a tiny bit of plagiarism (remember the grouting pans and cored masonry walls): John’s lineage harks back to the writings and drawings of his predecessors, Frank Baines and especially FS Jack in the Ministry of Works. By the time John’s last book The Conservation of Ruins was published, I suppose he had started to see his own life in perspective, with an end probably in sight. The first few pages are stacked full of gracious acknowledgements to those who had touched his professional life: architects, scientists, archaeologists, historians, conservators and his beloved craftsmen. Although he was an intensely private person, we have all been touched by John. His books and we are his enduring legacy. John Fidler, based in Los Angeles, works at Simpson Gumpertz and Heger, consulting engineers. He was formerly the conservation director of English Heritage. The four virtues I have happy recollections of John Ashurst from many periods of my life. The first was when I worked for the Council for the Care of Churches and formed a small task group to investigate the use, decay mechanisms and conservation of marble in English churches and cathedrals. The key members were Ken Hempel, then senior sculpture conservator of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and John Ashurst of the ancient monuments branch of the Ministry of Public Building andWorks. It struck me immediately that John’s contributions had four outstanding virtues: clarity of expression, such that it was not difficult to understand what he was saying, and you could not feel excluded from the argument; caution, no doubt inculcated by the prevailing culture at that time in government ministries; modesty and charm, with his engaging hair lick; and a reluctance to be drawn into unnecessary controversy. Those virtues were even more to the fore in the two great cathedral conservation programmes of the 1970s and 1980s, monitored by, respectively, theWells Cathedral west front committee and the Exeter Cathedral technical advisory committee. These two committees were especially important at the time in being multi-disciplinary in a way that is now accepted as the norm but was then revolutionary. We were committees which knitted together the knowledge and skills of the dean and his home team, including the cathedral architect – with a healthy mixture of architects, archaeologists, art historians, conservators, and local historians. The world of academe met the burgeoning world of conservation. John gradually shared more and more freely what experiments and evaluations of stone conservation techniques were going on in the ministry and later English Heritage. My third and particularly happy memory of him was when seven of us were invited by the German parliament to visit the Offices for the Protection of Historic Monuments in several different German states. This involved a fortnight of intensive travel and debate, both with our German hosts and among ourselves. I witnessed a more light-hearted, convivial, side of John than I had seen before – happy with a glass of wine or beer in his hand to have animated conversations about aspects of heritage conservation philosophy and practice. I have memories of him too as an outstanding lecturer on aspects of stone conservation, in particular at the annual study week devoted to stone conservation at The King’s Manor,York, when I was responsible for conservation studies. Here he needed to be both a team player and also a star. His images and his gentle, persuasive mode of presentation were impeccable. It was also intriguing to observe how, starting from a cautious beginning, he gradually became a powerful advocate of the lime revival, and of the whole vital business of analysing mortars and then using appropriate mortars for pointing and other aspects of building repair works. In that respect it
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